Become a person of action.

Tag: quote
(page 1 of 5)

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

- Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon professor and speaker of The Last Lecture

“The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.”

“The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it.”

- C.C. Scott

The talented Regina Brett has graciously given me the go-ahead to share some of her life lessons with you. Originally published in The Plain Dealer in 2006, the column 45 life lessons and 5 to grow on quickly became one of the most popular to ever be published in the newspaper; it’s become a modern-day classic of sorts.

I like her lessons because she doesn’t use lengthy explanations or clever kitsch to drive her points home; they’re just simple truths about life from a woman with a keen eye, packaged for easy carrying.

My favorites are below.

11. Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.

18. A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.

25. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.

26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: “In five years, will this matter?”

“Today, give yourself permission to be outrageously kind, irrationally warm, improbably generous. I promise it will be a blast.”

- Sasha Dichter

“Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.”

- Catherine M. Wallace

“Life is truly a ride. We’re all strapped in, and no one can stop it. As you make your way from youth to adulthood to maturity, sometimes you put your arms up and scream; sometimes you just hang onto the bar in front of you. But the ride is the thing. I think the most you can hope for at the end of life is that your hair is messed up, you’re out of breath, and you didn’t throw up.”

I Feel Fancy

That Legal & Karmic Stuff

Unless another author is cited, everything published on Live Your Verb is written by me, Melissa Zehner. I have sole copyrights to this material.
Feel free to share anything you like, as long as it is cited properly and linked back to Live Your Verb.
If something here has been incorrectly cited or shared, please tell me so I can correct it.